Remembering Bernard Beard

Over at the original post, John Bossard comments:

Dr. Beard was a colleague of mine as we worked together at the ARES Huntsville office, and I considered him a friend, and I hope he considered me the same.

Bernard had a wide-ranging intellect, and made numerous contributions in a variety of fields, including computational particle physics, before moving into the aerospace field, where he worked for PW in turbojet engines and flight trajectory analysis. He then went into academics, teaching in the ME dept at Christian Brothers in Memphis, and eventually becoming department chair.

It was my opinion that the progressive politics and trans-logical arguments of the academic world eventually lead him to seek work back in the aerospace world, and it was my pleasure to get to work with him when he joined ARES Corporation in 2007. There, Bernard made significant contributions in a variety of different areas, most notably in working on slosh mechanics of the Ares I upper stage, where he developed some amazing analytic modeling capabilities. His website, “Slosh Central”, provided a great deal of references regarding this topic.

Bernard was a reserved, dignified person, of even temperament; calm, and thoughtful. He was a master of the BBQ, and participated in numerous team competitions out of Memphis, where he kept his home with his wife and two sons. He was also scouter, participating as an adult leader in cub and boy scouts with his sons, and this was an area where we found a great deal of common ground.

I’m sure there were many other things that Bernard did, that I’m not aware of, as would be the case of a man with a powerful intellect and imagination.

His passing was sudden and unexpected, and is a tragedy. He will indeed be missed.

Thanks, John.

Wernher Von Braun

He would have been a hundred years old today. Also, it’s the 29th anniversary of the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative. “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Related to last item: Japan prepares missile defense in anticipation of North Korean launch.

[Update a few minutes later]

Back to von Braun: a blog post from Roger Launius.

Diminished Climate Alarmism

Lessons from l’affaire Heartland:

The Heartland affair has shown not merely that some climate alarmists (namely Gleick) will stoop to outright deception, and most of his peers will close ranks to defend him in a sort of Green Wall of Silence. Perhaps more disturbing, it reveals that these people really have no idea how their opponents on the climate issue actually view the world. So when they dismiss skeptics as having no legitimate arguments, it should make outsiders take pause.

Without being a trained climate scientist, I can read the various blogs and try to parse the academic papers, but ultimately I have to rely a lot on the good faith and judgment of the scientists themselves. The Heartland affair has reassured my earlier conviction that the case for climate alarmism is far weaker than the alarmists have been telling us.

His emphasis. I think it applies to how the Left views its skeptics in general.

ObamaCare

approaches its day of reckoning. As do its authors, in November.

Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.

And no celebration of its two-year anniversary. I guess it wasn’t as much of a BFD as Joe Biden said it was. Or perhaps it is, but not in the way he thought.

[Update a few minutes later]

Happy second birthday, ObamaCare! “Now let’s destroy it, root and branch.”

[Update a while later]

Five things
the Democrats (politically) got wrong on ObamaCare. Did they get anything right?

[Mid-morning update]

Heh: “Democrats so misjudged everything about Obamacare, you would think they never read the bill or something.”

[Late morning update]

WSJ: Liberty and ObamaCare.

Straight People

Are they born that way?

I know I was. And if someone “self identifies” as straight, but shows signs of arousal by the same sex, they’re not straight, they’re bi. I don’t understand why the concept of a spectrum, a distribution from pure homosexual through bisexual to pure heterosexual, skewed toward the latter, is such a hard concept for people to get their heads around.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!